Read Lupita Nyong'o's amazing speech about blackness and beauty

"I got teased and taunted about my night-shaded skin," the actress revealed about her childhood

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March 1, 2014 1:01AM (UTC)

"12 Years a Slave" actress Lupita Nyong'o, a favorite for Best Supporting Actress in this year's Oscars race, gave a moving speech on beauty -- specifically "dark beauty" -- on Wednesday. Nyong'o spoke at the ESSENCE Black Women in Hollywood Luncheon, where she was awarded Best Breakthrough Performance for her role as Patsey.

In her speech, Nyong'o responded to a letter from a dark-skinned girl who was about to buy skin-bleaching creme until she saw Nyongo's rise to success in Hollywood. "I think you’re really lucky to be this Black but yet this successful in Hollywood overnight. I was just about to buy Dencia’s Whitenicious cream to lighten my skin when you appeared on the world map and saved me," the girl wrote.

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"My heart bled a little when I read those words," said Nyong'o. "I could never have guessed that my first job out of school would be so powerful in and of itself and that it would propel me to be such an image of hope in the same way that the women of 'The Color Purple' were to me."

The actress could relate to the girl, and talked about harboring a similar feeling of "self-hate" as a girl because of the darkness of her "night-shaded skin":

I remember a time when I too felt unbeautiful. I put on the TV and only saw pale skin, I got teased and taunted about my night-shaded skin. And my one prayer to God, the miracle worker, was that I would wake up lighter-skinned. The morning would come and I would be so excited about seeing my new skin that I would refuse to look down at myself until I was in front of a mirror because I wanted to see my fair face first. And every day I experienced the same disappointment of being just as dark as I was the day before. I tried to negotiate with God, I told him I would stop stealing sugar cubes at night if he gave me what I wanted, I would listen to my mother's every word and never lose my school sweater again if he just made me a little lighter. But I guess God was unimpressed with my bargaining chips because He never listened.

And when I was a teenager my self-hate grew worse, as you can imagine happens with adolescence. My mother reminded me often that she thought that I was beautiful but that was no conservation, she’s my mother, of course she’s supposed to think I am beautiful. And then … Alek Wek. A celebrated model, she was dark as night, she was on all of the runways and in every magazine and everyone was talking about how beautiful she was. Even Oprah called her beautiful and that made it a fact. I couldn’t believe that people were embracing a woman who looked so much like me, as beautiful. My complexion had always been an obstacle to overcome and all of a sudden Oprah was telling me it wasn’t. It was perplexing and I wanted to reject it because I had begun to enjoy the seduction of inadequacy. But a flower couldn’t help but bloom inside of me, when I saw Alek I inadvertently saw a reflection of myself that I could not deny. Now, I had a spring in my step because I felt more seen, more appreciated by the far away gatekeepers of beauty. But around me, the preference for my skin prevailed, to the courters that I thought mattered I was still unbeautiful. And my mother again would say to me you can’t eat beauty, it doesn’t feed you and these words plagued and bothered me; I didn’t really understand them until finally I realized that beauty was not a thing that I could acquire or consume, it was something that I just had to be.

"What is fundamentally beautiful is compassion for yourself and for those around you," Nyong'o later realized. "That kind of beauty enflames the heart and enchants the soul."

"I hope that my presence on your screens and in the magazines may lead you, young girl, on a similar journey," Nyong'o said, in closing. "That you will feel the validation of your external beauty but also get to the deeper business of being beautiful inside. There is no shade to that beauty."